Eight tips to get the most from video content

Video is a powerful storytelling medium: Not only can it serve as a prime proving ground for your business’ promotional campaigns, influential ideas, and experimental content efforts, video’s emotionally resonant combination of sound, motion,
and visuals can also help you drive deeper, more satisfying relationships between your brand and its audience. Considering the high costs and tight competition, brands need to be smart in how they plan, produce, position, and promote their
video content if they want to see any returns on their investment. Here are some tips for making sure your offerings are as relevant, memorable, strategic, and purposeful as possible.

1. Invest in the process, not just the product:

Your video strategy should be considered part and parcel to your content marketing strategy. Before you decide to create video, think about the role you want video to play in your brand’s story, and what steps it will take to plot out, produce,
position, and measure the performance of this content. Doing this legwork ahead of time will help you make smarter decisions about which video projects will be worthy of the resources you have to spend.

2. Keep your end goal in mind:

Whether it’s awareness, leads, or another goal, every video you create should have a purpose – and a means of fulfilling it. Too often, video success is equated with views rather than with actions taken after the views or other desirable
changes of consumer behavior. You can avoid falling into this trap by including a call to action that directs viewers to take the next step on your designated path, as well as by creating a landing page that will guide their journey toward
conversion.

3. Write a script your audience will want to follow:

Video content runs the risk of getting bogged down by overly complex ideas, heavy jargon, or focusing on too many things all at once. If you want your video to communicate simply and brilliantly, remember these scripting guidelines:

• Use a conversational tone – it makes the video sound more natural, instead of stuffy or forced.

• Have your talent speak in short, concise sentences to emphasize key points. It makes it easier for your audience to grasp them.

• Avoid jargon like “optimum” or “accomplish” when simpler words like “best” or “do” will work just as well to get your meaning across.

• Read it out loud (or have someone else read it to you) before you hit “record.” This gives you a sense of any words or phrases the speaker might be likely to stumble on, and how long the finished project is likely to run.

4. Know when to host and when to post:

Before you distribute your video content consider it strengths and limitations:

• Host the video on your site using a video platform like Vimeo, Brightcove, or Wistia. While this method might limit your videos’ overall reach, the flexibility these tools offer means you can customize your videos to look, feel, and
operate exactly how you want. It also makes it easier to publish video playlists that encourage visitors to spend more time on your site, as well as to gate your most valuable video assets as a means to drive subscriptions.

• Post it on a video-hosting site. Using popular video-distribution platforms like YouTube can help get your video in front of a larger audience. Not only is basic use of these services free, their tools are typically easier to configure
than self-hosted options, which makes your videos easier to share across your other content channels and embed in your other content efforts.

The answers to questions like these – and most other distribution channel decisions you need to make – lie in your buyer personas. Knowing who your audience is, how and where they like to spend their online time, and which channels they
prefer for what tasks will help you choose the social networks that offer the best potential for engaging your audience’s interest in your video content.

5. Include a transcript:

Search engines aren’t as adept at indexing video content as they are with text. Creating a full transcript of the copy included in your video helps you overcome this SEO shortfall.

6. Tag your work:

Add relevant tags, titles, and descriptions to the metadata of your video content. This will help get your videos associated with your target keywords and get them indexed to rank for relevant content searches.

7. Push videos to influencers, subscribers, fans, and followers:

A screen capture of your videos (along with a link) can be featured in an email that you send to the members of your mailing list. This alerts your audience that you have new video content for them to check out, and gives you a forum for
requesting their feedback and asking them to help you spread the word.

8. Track attention span to evaluate value:

Engagement data can provide important insights on your audience’s preferences and behaviors, which you can use to refine and customize your video strategy. For example, if you notice that prospects are dropping off 10 seconds into your videos,
your intros might need to be trimmed.

Conclusion

It takes a lot of work to position video as the high-performing centerpiece of a successful content marketing strategy. But with the right plan, a little creativity, and some smart decision-making, just about any business can benefit from
its powerful potential to tell engaging stories and inspire audiences to take action.